SUMMER SPORTS CLASSIC II

The Sport I Never Meant To Play

Am I an athlete now?

Hailuo AI image created by the author

I was seventeen in 1979, and I had made it through high school without ever once voluntarily participating in anything that required touching my arch nemesis, the ball.

As my parents drove away on August 8, 1979, it hit me that I was on my own at college. Along with 800 other freshmen, I had most of August to choose my classes and, more importantly, which clubs I wanted to join, not to mention girls, a subject I had a lot of opinions and few facts about.

I was dressed to attract, showing off my Hawaiian Tropic-tanned legs in white terry-cloth short shorts, a red Van Halen T-shirt, and my brand new Nike Tailwinds that had never seen an athletic field.

Clipped to my waist was my trusty Walkman, pumping the soundtrack to Grease through my headphones. I was singing along, loud and confidently off-key, as I made a beeline for the school radio station.

Just as I sang the line, “summer loving had me a blast,” I bumped into a girl playing with a Frisbee.

Girl? I mean, goddess. A fresh-faced beauty with shiny, long black hair and a figure right out of the pages of Playboy. She looked at me with sky blue eyes and asked, “Did you say you’re looking for summer loving?”

My face grew redder than my T-shirt, and I mumbled. “I was just singing along with Grease.”

“Wow! You’re from Greece! I’m Pepita. Wanna sign up for Ultimate Frisbee?”

I did not want to play. I did not know what “Ultimate Frisbee” was. And I was not from Greece. But Pepita could have asked me to sign up for Satan worship, and I would have said, “What time?”

I was imagining how beautiful she’d look in a wedding dress when she said, “I’m so glad you’re gonna come play with us. It’s super chill. No refs. You make your own calls.”

This was supposed to be a selling point. To me, it sounded like organized chaos. “You mean people just… decide for themselves if it was a foul?”

“Yeah, it’s called spirit of the game.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded like something that happened at a commune, and I had seen Easy Rider. I was not going to a commune.

I went anyway, because I was seventeen and, you know, Pepita.

The field was in the park behind the Student Union. There were maybe twenty people out there, and I immediately saw that exactly zero of them looked like athletes. One guy had a long beard and was wearing moccasins. A woman was drinking what appeared to be liquified lawn and also smoking what appeared to be a joint. I relaxed slightly. These were my people.

Then someone yelled, “WE’RE PULLING!” and twenty people started running like they’d just escaped from prison.

The disc went up. People moved. There was sprinting. There was cutting. A guy in a tank top did a full commitment horizontal dive and caught the disc about six inches from the ground. He rolled twice, stood up, and pumped his fist like he had just invented fire.

Nobody called a penalty. Nobody looked confused. Everyone just kept playing.

I had never seen anything like this. I was deeply uncomfortable.

Adding to my level of discomfort was the fact that Pepita had one of those new, ultra-powerful ghetto blasters that filled the whole field with music. Which would have been great, but all she played was the Grateful Dead.

Music was always very important to me. I had a wide range of musical tastes, from show tunes to heavy metal, but I did not like the Grateful Dead. This was a deal breaker. In my mind, my fantasy about Pepita went from wedding to bedding.

The fact is that Ultimate Frisbee had a lot of Deadheads. This was not a coincidence. The sport had apparently been invented by people who thought “disc” and “freedom” were synonyms. They liked to do bong hits while they played, and I think at least one person out there was playing naked because that was the kind of sport this was.

The drugs and the nudity were fine, but I did not vibe with the music.

I showed up to play with my Walkman, playing Devo because I needed something with structure.

By the second game, I had done four things I had never planned to do:

1. Run voluntarily
2. Dive on grass

3. Touch another human being during a physical activity (accidentally, in my defense)

4. Smile at a sporting event in a way that wasn’t ironic

A girl named Sunshine, who was really good at throwing, handed me the disc and said, “Nice cut, man.”

Nobody had ever told me I did something well during a sport. In gym class, I was the kid who was picked last in a way that was almost graceful in its cruelty, like the other students had practiced. Being good at sports was for other people, the way being tall was for other people, or having your father spend time with you was for other people.

And here was Sunshine, who could throw a flick like she was born doing it, telling me I made a good cut.

I didn’t know what a cut was. But I wanted another one.

Here’s what I didn’t say at the time, but I’ll say now: Ultimate Frisbee is a sport designed by people who hated the parts of sports that made sports terrible for me.

No refs meant no angry men in stripes screaming at my young self. Self-officiating meant you had to act like an adult, which was annoying but also meant nobody got away with anything because everyone was watching. Mixed gender teams meant the game couldn’t get away with being weird about anything, because there were women out there who would absolutely call you on your nonsense. Plus… girls!

Also, you couldn’t foul someone without someone noticing, and the culture was so aggressively chill that a hard foul just meant everyone got wheatgrass juice afterward and talked about their feelings.

I hated wheatgrass juice. But I liked that the option existed.

Pepita asked me on the walk back if I was coming to practice tomorrow.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m in.”

I went home and wrote “ULTIMATE FRISBEE” in my journal in big letters, which I had never done for anything before, not even when I started getting into The Clash.

That night, I called my dad, which I rarely did.

“How’s school?” he asked.

“It’s good,” I said. “I made a team.”

He was quiet for a second. I think he thought I was joking. For seventeen years, I had been telling him I didn’t do teams, I didn’t do sports, I was not a watcher, not a player, and that was just who I was.

By now, his dreams weren’t just crushed, they were forgotten.

“Really?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re not very good. But we’re getting better.”

I could hear him smile through the phone.

Somewhere out there, a version of me was still standing at the edge of the gym class, hands in pockets, watching. He looked miserable. He looked committed to being miserable. He looked like he’d given up before he even started.

I wanted to walk over to him and say: “Hey. Get out there. It’s stupid. You’ll be bad at first. Everyone is bad at first. Nobody cares. Just try.”

But you can’t do that. People have to find it themselves.

So I kept playing. And kept getting better. And every day in the park, when that first throw went up, and twenty people took off running, I thought: This is stupid. This is weird. I love it.

And that’s the part I never expected. Not that I got good at something. That I got good at something stupid. That the thing that redeemed me in my father’s eyes was a plastic disc and a bunch of long-haired weirdos who believed, against all evidence, that you could make your own rules and still win at the game of being alive.

And, though I’ve learned to tolerate it, the Grateful Dead still suck. I want to be clear about that.

Spirit of the game, my ass.

Thanks for reading. Here’s another funny memoir:

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